You all should know by now that I love the musical Spring Awakening! I’ve already done several songs from it and I hope that one day I’ll have done them all! In an effort to do that, I decided to record a couple of songs a capella that I hadn’t done before!

The first song is The Mirror-Blue Night. I started out a little low with this one for my range, but it gets higher as the song progresses, so I think it needed to be that low.

That song was pretty short, so I decided to do another one! The second song is The Dark I Know Well. I was reluctant to do this song at first because it’s about two of the girls being sexually abused by their fathers, but I decided I needed to tackle it anyways.

Today’s song come from my favorite musical, which you all know by now… Spring Awakening! This song is And Then There Were None. I had sort of avoided this song until now because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to tackle the speaking part (Melchior’s mother) and the Moritz’s singing in one song, but after trying it a few times, it just wasn’t the same without the spoken part, so I had to do it!

I started out by putting all of the piano parts into Garage Band and then I recorded the spoken part. I had to mess with the lengths of some of the piano parts to get things to line up right, but eventually worked it out. I then started to add the vocal part on top, but I quickly realized the original key was too low for me, so I bumped it up a 5th and went on my merry way! After that, I recorded the background vocals and was done!

Today I got a chance to record the song I had written out yesterday. Like I said, I just adjusted the volume of each of the parts so that the one I was recording was loudest and easier to follow. Here’s the finished product!

Like I said the other day, I want to eventually cover all of the songs from the musical Spring Awakening, so today I started on another song, Mama Who Bore Me – Reprise. You may remember that I already did a song called Mama Who Bore Me, along with another song acapella a couple of days ago, but this is the song that goes between those two. This is where all the girl singers come center stage to join Wendla in singing about her lack of knowledge that I talked about last time, and is also the first taste of the rock and roll style and edginess that are throughout the musical.

I decided that I wanted to record all of the parts to this acapella. At first I tried just looking at the music while singing with the track, but I had a hard time making out the individual parts, so I had to write them out in Garage Band individually. Well, it took quite a while to get the parts all written out, so I didn’t have time to actually record them today. I thought I’d go ahead and present what I have to you so you can get a glimpse into my process and how much goes into some of these pieces I do! Here’s just the garage band midi piano with all 5 tracks at equal volume.

When I record all the parts tomorrow, I will take it one track at a time and reduce the volume of the other tracks so the one I need stands out! It’s sort of a long process, but I think it’s worth it to make sure I hit all the right notes! I look forward to recording this tomorrow!

These two songs, Mama Who Bore Me and All That’s Known, are two more from the musical, Spring Awakening. They’re both fairly short, so I decided to just record them together as one track. The more I think about it, though, these two songs are quite appropriate for each other! They both are the songs where we meet the main characters. Mama Who Bore Me introduces Wendla and is about her want for knowledge of sexual things and her mother’s refusal to tell her. All That’s Known shows you Melchior, who is quite the opposite in the fact that he knows probably too much about such things, and everything in general, and when he tries to speak his mind, he gets in trouble for it.

Keeping in the theme of the last post, I recorded another song from the musical Spring Awakening, The Song of Purple Summer. This song is the last one of the musical and the one where everyone comes back to center stage, together. Honestly, this song was never one of my favorites of the musical, but I really like the harmonies in it, so I thought I’d give it a shot with multi-part acapella.

I just sang the parts while listening to the track and looking at the sheet music. The lowest part, when it first comes in, is a little low for me, so forgive the cracking!

This song is another one from my favorite musical, Spring Awakening. This song is a duet between two of the characters, and is one of the most pivotal moments of the play. I just recorded both parts acapella.

I love how these two songs meld together. It’s like Moritz’s innocent past being sung by Ilse tries to remind him that there are happier times and can still be, but Moritz can only think about all the sadness of the present, and unfortunately that’s what wins in the end. Everything about this musical is amazing!!!

Yesterday I got really caught up in working on something for a later project, and completely forgot to do one at all to post!! So, sorry, I’m yet another day behind… but I hope to catch up later tonight!

For this post, I wanted to do something else acapella with multiple parts, because I just love doing it so much!! So, I looked through all my sheet music and came across I Believe (be careful… that link has nudity and sexual content… FYI!) from Spring Awakening. That song has several parts that intertwine and overlap each other, so I thought it would be an interesting one to try acapella! So I gave it a shot! I couldn’t sing the low “there is love in heaven” round part where it was written, so I just sang it up an octave. I think it turned out pretty well!

I was listening to my music on shuffle today while studying, and Spring Awakening songs kept coming on! I took is as a sign that I needed to record a song from it for yesterday’s project! I decided to do one of my favorite songs, My Junk. For this one, I decided to record the guitar part using multiple recorder parts. I recorded 3 (sometimes 4… for like 2 measures) on Soprano Recorder, but they were an octave too high, so I put them down an octave in Garage Band. I then recorded the main vocal part and one of the harmonies. This took forever!!!! For whatever reason, I had a really hard time getting the rhythms to line up with the recorder. Sometimes it’s still a little off and the harmony is sort of iffy, but oh well!

So, yeah, this is a day late… Yesterday was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day! I would go into details, but just take my word for it that it was bad! So when I got off work, I just sort of crashed, hung out with a friend and did homework. Anything I would have produced for the blog yesterday would have also been terrible, horrible, no good, and very bad!

At any rate, this project more than makes up for it, I think! It’s another song from my favorite musical, Spring Awakening! This song is The Guilty Ones, and I decided upon it mostly because it was doable on alto recorder (using soprano fingerings). So, I ended up doing 3 parts on recorder (I had to make one go down an octave in Garage Band because I couldn’t play that low), a small part on guitar (not real guitar… just put it in GB) and voice over all of that! WHEW!

This took pretty long to get all the parts in time together, but I think it turned out really well! In fact, I think it might be my best recording yet?? Although Techo Baby Baby has a special place in my heart!